Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Not rarely I see people complaining that hybrid applications are bad. That having something hybrid is just "outdated". I do think it's the other way around. Hybrid applications follow the very simple principle:

"Technology is just a means to an end".

In our current world, transforming at an outstanding high rate, we want things fast. We want technology to solve problems. We want to have that super hyper cool app for that event coming in 2 weeks ready to go. We want that app to support our yet to be release product really quick or we'll miss that business opportunity (and the cost of opportunity is huge). We want to answer business needs, real world use cases. We don't want to be concerned that Apple enforces 3746 provisioning profiles to have an app distributed and Google has "xpto" signing key. We don't want to know what an "ipa" or an "apk" is. We don't want to know that you have to write Objective-C to access an iPhone camera and Java to an Android phone. Oh, wait, missing Windows Phone. That's not why we should have technology. We want an app that can reach the wider audience possible to transmit a message, to give power to clients. We should take advantage of technology and not be servants of technology.

Is hybrid bad? It depends! It depends on all the requirements you have to comply with. Maybe hybrid is the right path for your needs.